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Dream Houses

We can happily live with disagreements of taste when it comes to art, or poetry, or music. I listen to Abba on my iPod, you listen to Brahms on yours, and everybody’s content. But architecture is different. If I build a Zaha Hadid deconstructed-boomerang house across the street from your mock-Tudor raised ranch, you’re going to have to look at it whether you want to or not. And if Donald Trump pulls down a few 19th-century brownstones to put up the 110-story gilded-glass Trump Basilisk, we’re all going to have to look at it, even if it kills us.

It is because architecture is an essentially public art that we need some shared sense of architectural value. Do we want to live amid the rationally ordered boulevards of Paris, or the complexity and contradiction of the Vegas Strip? Is less more, or a bore? Will a new museum in the form of a gigantic titanium-clad blob transform our backwater hometown into an exciting cultural capital? Can the right sort of architecture even improve our character?

These are the sort of reflections prompted by Alain de Botton’s latest book, “The Architecture of Happiness.” De Botton, a young author of briskly selling meditations on such themes as status anxiety, travel and the life-changing power of Proust, here turns his attention to architecture, pondering the question of just what are the elusive qualities that make one building beautiful and another hideous.

The answer used to seem obvious enough: a beautiful building was one that realized certain abstract ideals of symmetry, proportion and harmony. It was all a matter of following the rules for the “classical orders” laid out in Roman times by Vitruvius and promulgated anew during the Renaissance by Alberti and Palladio — rules specifying, for instance, precisely how a Doric column should taper as it ascends to the architrave.

But in the 18th century this classical consensus began to break down. Horace Walpole struck a blow by building the world’s first Gothic house, a picturesque pile on the banks of the Thames, which he called Strawberry Hill. Before long, de Botton notes, architects were boasting “of their ability to turn out houses in Indian, Chinese, Egyptian, Islamic, Tyrolean or Jacobean styles, or in any combination of these.” One aristocratic couple resolved their own clashing tastes by commissioning a house split down the middle, Palladian classical in the front, Gothic revival in the rear.

Photo

The house in Vienna that the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein designed for his sister.Credit
Dagmar Landova/Imago — Getty Images

The possibilities became even more dizzying with the introduction of new materials and building technologies. As the role of engineering became ever more prestigious, a seductive idea arose: perhaps architectural excellence could be reduced to function. To this way of thinking, the most elegant bridge was the one that spanned the greatest distance with the lightest material.

Taking the new functional aesthetic into the home, however, did not prove an entirely happy experiment. Le Corbusier famously described the ideal house as a “machine for living,” but his own domestic masterpiece, the Villa Savoye, was deemed “uninhabitable” by the couple who commissioned it. “It’s raining in the hall, it’s raining on the ramp,” Madame Savoye wrote the architect. “What’s more, it’s still raining in my bathroom.”

Such functional problems don’t make Le Corbusier’s immaculate geometries any the less thrilling. As John Ruskin observed, we don’t want our buildings merely to shelter us; we also want them to speak to us. But of what? De Botton has an answer. Great buildings, he says, “speak of visions of happiness.”

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This claim is bolder than it sounds. Architecture, after all, consists mainly of abstract forms. A building by Santiago Calatrava may suggest a dove taking flight, but that’s a far cry from expressing an ideal of the good life. Think of music, though. A movement from a late Beethoven quartet manages to convey a sense of joyous resignation, perhaps because its abstract tonal structures mirror the dynamics of our emotional lives. Mightn’t architecture work the same way?

De Botton thinks so, and he makes the most of this expressionist theme on his jolly (and handsomely illustrated) romp through the world of architecture. He writes eloquently of how different architectural features hint at aspects of human flourishing: how, say, pointed Gothic arches “convey ardor and intensity,” whereas their rounded classical counterparts “embody serenity and poise.” His visions of happiness range from the ordered complexity of the Doge’s Palace in Venice to Richard Neutra’s sleek modernist pavilions in the Hollywood Hills, which speak “of honesty and ease, of a lack of inhibition and a faith in the future.” Wherever he casts his eye, what he sees, in material form, are the lineaments of gratified desire.

Like de Botton’s previous books, this one contains its quota of piffle dressed up in pompous language. Sometimes the effect is (intentionally?) humorous, in a Woody Allen-ish sort of way. Taking shelter from a London downpour, de Botton ducks into a McDonald’s, where the harsh lighting and sounds of French fries bubbling in vats of oil remind him of “the loneliness and meaninglessness of existence in a random and violent universe.” When a gaggle of noisy Finnish teenagers arrives, he flees to the nearby Westminster Cathedral, whose sublime interior repairs his delicate soul.

Focusing on happiness can be a lovely way to make sense of architectural beauty, but it probably won’t be of much help in resolving conflicts of taste. In a liberal society, there is as much disagreement on what constitutes the best life as there is on what constitutes the best built environment to live it in. Curiously, among the many dozens of buildings pictured in de Botton’s book, the one that crops up most frequently is a house that the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein designed for his sister in Vienna. True to its creator’s character, it is mercilessly austere: cubic in form, with stone floors, lacquered metal doors and naked light bulbs. It makes Philip Johnson’s Glass House look cheesy and suburban. The Wittgenstein House is a thing of beauty. But I don’t think even de Botton would be terribly happy living in it.

Jim Holt, a regular contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine, is working on a book about the puzzle of existence.